The Odd Thomas Series 7-Book Bundle

by Dean Koontz

  After that, he slept alone in his room.

  Here by the sea, I wrote these memoirs in what psychologists call a flow state. The words spilled from me as though I were taking dictation.

  The dogs do the usual doggy things. Because Raphael can see Boo as clearly as I can, he has a playmate, but my ghost dog has all the advantages in their games.

  I dream no more of Auschwitz and do not fear dying twice.

  I dream of Stormy, of the years we had together, which were years rich in experience, and of how it might be when at last we are together again, though that is a thing that can only be seen in dreams.

  My journey isn’t yet at an end. Sooner than later, I will be called to the road again. I learn by going where I have to go.

  Annamaria says I’ll know when we must move on because I will wake in the night to hear the ringing of the pendant bell that I wear around my neck.

  She is now in her eighth month, but she’s grown no larger. When I worry that she should have prenatal care, she tells me that she has been pregnant a long time and will be pregnant longer still, whatever that means.

  Two nights ago, at dinner, in the center of the table, one of those large, waxy-petaled flowers floated in a shallow green bowl. She said she plucked it from a tree in the neighborhood, but though I’ve gone on a few long walks in search of it, I’ve not yet found that tree.

  I asked her to show me the trick with the flower. As it turns out, she showed it to Tim back in Roseland. But she says it is not merely a trick, and the time for her to show it to me will come when I know the real name for it. Go figure.

  Our friend Blossom, from Magic Beach, who calls herself the Happy Monster, phoned to say she will join us in another week. She was gravely disfigured as a child, when her drunken father set her on fire. Why so often childen, and why so often their parents? I guess it’s just the nature of this long, long war. Anyway, I can’t wait to see Blossom, for she is beautiful in her disfigurement.

  Yesterday, shortly after Tim took his morning shower, he was overcome by the feeling that he was still dirty. He showered again, and then a third time. After that I found him washing his hands incessantly at the kitchen sink, and weeping.

  He did not know why he felt this way, but I knew it was the years at Roseland that he had not yet forgotten as thoroughly as he needed to forget them.

  Even Annamaria could not soothe him, so I took him to the front porch, just us guys, with a Mr. Goodbar for each of us. As we watched the shorebirds kiting in the sky, I told him about the best part of a Mr. Goodbar.

  The best part of a Mr. Goodbar is not the wrapper, is it? No, and the best part of a Coke is not the can. On those nights when you lie awake, either man or boy, wondering about yourself, peeling away one layer of oddness after another, you should remember and always be grateful that the woefully imperfect person that you are, with all your contradictions and unworthy desires, is not the best of you, any more than the wrapper is the best part of a Mr. Goodbar.

  Tim said he didn’t understand me any more than I understand Annamaria, but he felt better. That’s all that matters, really: that we can make each other feel better.

  For a while I did not feel at all good about how I had turned away Mr. Hitchcock in that glen in Roseland. I worried that he wouldn’t return to seek my help.

  This morning, however, as I sat on the front porch drinking coffee, he strolled by on the beach in a three-piece suit and black wingtips. He waved at me and kept walking, but I suspect that any day now, when I come out for coffee on the porch, he’ll be there.

  It’s a little daunting to consider what the director of Psycho might wish to convey to me. But then he was also the director of North by Northwest and other films that were as funny as they were suspenseful. And he made some great love stories. I’m a sucker for love stories, as you probably know by now.

  And so I wait for the bell to ring in the night. I dream of Stormy, I walk in search of Annamaria’s mysterious tree, I go down to the sea to swim in the shallows with Tim, and I wait for the bell to ring.

  To Jeff Zaleski,

  with gratitude for

  his insight and integrity.

  Odd Interlude is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  2013 Bantam Books eBook Edition

  Copyright © 2012 by Dean Koontz

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  A signed, limited edition has been privately printed by Charnel House. Charnelhouse.com.

  BANTAM BOOKS and the rooster colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Title page photograph by Diane “dinny” Miller

  Originally published as a serial e-book in the United States by Bantam Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2012.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-54518-3

  Cover art and design: Scott Biel

  Cover photo (man): Florence Caplain

  Published simultaneously in the United States and Canada

  www.bantamdell.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Master - Table of Contents

  Odd Interlude

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: South of Moonlight Bay

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Part Two: Two-Part Harmony

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part Three: In the Corner

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  One

  They say that every road leads home if you care to go there. I long for home, for the town of Pico Mundo and the desert in which it blooms, but the roads that I take seem to lead me to one hell after another.

  In the front passenger seat of the Mercedes, through the side window, I watch the stars, which appear to be fixed but in fact are ever moving and perpetually receding. They seem eternal, but they are only suns that will burn out one day.

  When she was just a child, Stormy Llewellyn lost her mother, Cassiopeia. I lost Stormy when she and I were twenty. One of the northern constellations is called Cassiopeia. No group of distant suns is named for Stormy.

  I can see Cassiopeia’s namesake high in the night, but I can see Stormy only in my memory, where she remains as vivid as any living person I might meet.

  The stars and everything else in the universe began with the big bang, which was when time also began. Some place existed before the universe, exists outside of it now, and will exist when the universe collapses back upon itself. In that mysterious place, outside of time, Stormy waits for me. Only through time can time be conquered, and the way forward is the only way back to my girl.

  Yet again, because of recent events, I have been called a hero, and again I don’t feel like one.

  Annamaria insists that mere hours earlier, I saved entire cities, sparing many hundreds of thousands from nuclear terrorism. Even if that is most likely true, I feel as though, in the process, I have forfeited a piece of my soul.

  To foil the conspiracy, I killed four men and one young woman. They would have killed me if given a chance, but the honest claim of
self-defense doesn’t make the killing lie less heavily upon my heart.

  I wasn’t born to kill. Like all of us, I was born for joy. This broken world, however, breaks most of us, grinding relentlessly on its metaled tracks.

  Leaving Magic Beach, fearing pursuit, I had driven the Mercedes that my friend Hutch Hutchison lent me. After several miles, when the memories of recent violence overwhelmed me, I stopped along the side of the road and changed places with Annamaria.

  Now, behind the wheel, by way of consolation, she says, “Life is hard, young man, but it was not always so.”

  I have known her less than twenty-four hours. And the longer I know her, the more she mystifies me. She is perhaps eighteen, almost four years younger than me, but she seems much older. The things she says are often cryptic, though I feel that the meaning would be clear to me if I were wiser than I am.

  Plain but not unattractive, petite, with flawless pale skin and great dark eyes, she seems to be about seven months pregnant. Any girl her age, in her condition, alone in the world as she is, ought to be anxious, but she is calm and confident, as if she believes that she lives a charmed life—which often seems to be the case.

  We are not linked romantically. After Stormy, there can be none of that for me. Although we do not speak of it, between us there is a kind of love, platonic but deep, strangely deep considering that we have known each other such a short while. I have no sister, although perhaps this is how I would feel if I were Annamaria’s brother.

  Magic Beach to Santa Barbara, our destination, is a four-hour drive, a straight shot down the coast. We have been on the road less than two hours when, two miles past the picturesque town of Moonlight Bay and Fort Wyvern—an army base that has been closed since the end of the Cold War—she says, “Do you feel it pulling at you, odd one?”

  My name is Odd Thomas, which I explained in previous volumes of this memoir, which I will no doubt explain again in future volumes, but which I will not explain here, in this detour from the main arc of my journey. Until Annamaria, only Stormy called me “odd one.”

  I am a short-order cook, though I haven’t worked in a diner since I left Pico Mundo eighteen months earlier. I miss the griddle, the deep fryer. A job like that is centering. Griddle work is Zen.

  “Do you feel it pulling?” she repeats. “Like the gravity of the moon pulling tides through the sea.”

  Curled on the backseat, the golden retriever, Raphael, growls as if in answer to Annamaria’s question. Our other dog, the white German shepherd named Boo, of course makes no sound.

  Slumped in my seat, head resting against the cool glass of the window in the passenger door, half hypnotized by the patterns in the stars, I feel nothing unusual until Annamaria asks her question. But then I sense unmistakably that something in the night summons me, not to Santa Barbara but elsewhere.

  I have a sixth sense with several facets, the first of which is that I can see the spirits of the lingering dead, who are reluctant to move on to the Other Side. They often want me to bring justice to their murderers or to help them find the courage to cross from this world to the next. Once in a while, I have a prophetic dream. And since leaving Pico Mundo after Stormy’s violent death, I seem to be magnetized and drawn toward places of trouble, to which some Power wishes me to travel.

  My life has mysterious purpose that I don’t understand, and day by day, conflict by conflict, I learn by going where I have to go.

  Now, to the west, the sea is black and forbidding except for a distorted reflection of the icy moon, which on those waters melts into a long silvery smear.

  In the headlights, the broken white line on the blacktop flashes toward the south.

  “Do you feel it pulling?” she asks again.

  The inland hills are dark, but ahead on the right, pools of warm light welcome travelers at a cluster of enterprises that are not associated with a town.

  “There,” I say. “Those lights.”

  As soon as I speak, I know we will find death in this place. But there is no turning back. I am compelled to act in these cases. Besides, this woman seems to have become my backup conscience, gently reminding me what is the right thing to do when I falter.

  A hundred yards past a sign that promises FOOD FUEL LODGING, an exit from the highway looms. She takes it fast, but with confidence and skill.

  As we reach the foot of the ramp and halt at a stop sign, I say, “You feel it, too?”

  “I’m not gifted as you are, odd one. I don’t feel such things. But I know.”

  “What do you know?”

  “What I need to know.”

  “Which is?”

  “Which is what is.”

  “And what is this what-is that you know?”

  She smiles. “I know what matters, how it all works, and why.”

  The smile suggests she enjoys tweaking me by being enigmatic—although there is no meanness in her teasing.

  I don’t believe there is any deception in her, either. I am convinced she always speaks the truth. And she does not, as it might seem, talk in code. She speaks the truth profoundly but perhaps as poets speak it: obliquely, employing paradox, symbols, metaphors.

  I met her on a public pier in Magic Beach. I know nothing of substance about her past. I don’t even know her last name; she claims that she doesn’t have one. When I first saw Annamaria, I sensed that she harbored extraordinary secrets and that she needed a friend. She has accepted my friendship and has given hers to me. But she holds tightly to her secrets.

  The stop sign is at an intersection with a two-lane county road that parallels the state highway. She turns left and drives toward a service station that is open even in these lonely hours before dawn, offering a discount brand of gasoline and a mechanic on call.

  Instead of a double score of gasoline pumps that a truck stop might offer, this station provides just four pumps on two islands. At the moment, none is in use.

  Dating from the 1930s, the flat-roofed white-stucco building features Art Deco details, including a cast-plaster frieze revealed by lights in the overhanging cornice. The frieze depicts stylized cars and borzoi hounds racing perpetually, painted in yellows, grays, and royal blue.

  The place is quaint, a little architectural gem from an age when even humble structures were often artfully designed and embellished. It is impeccably maintained, and the warm light in the panes of the French windows no doubt looks welcoming to an average traveler, although nothing here charms me.

  Intuition sometimes whispers to me but is seldom loud. Now it is equivalent to a shout, warning me that although this place might be pleasing to the eye, under the attractive surface lies something terrible.

  In the backseat, Raphael growls low again.

  I say, “I don’t like this place.”

  Annamaria is unperturbed. “If you liked it, young man, there’d be no reason for us to be here.”

  A tow truck stands beside the station. One of the two bay doors is raised, and even at this hour, a mechanic works on a Jaguar.

  A nattily dressed man with a mane of silver hair—perhaps the owner of the Jaguar, recently rescued from the side of the highway—stands watching the mechanic and sipping coffee from a paper cup. Neither of them looks up as we cruise past.

  Three eighteen-wheelers—a Mack, a Cascadia, and a Peterbilt—are parked on the farther side of the station. These well-polished rigs appear to belong to owner-operators, because they have custom paint jobs, numerous chrome add-ons, double-hump fenders, and the like.

  Beyond the trucks, a long low building appears to be a diner, in a style matching the service station. The eatery announces itself with rooftop red-and-blue neon: HARMONY CORNER / OPEN 24 HOURS. Two pickups and two SUVs are in front of the diner, and when Annamaria parks there, the Mercedes’ headlights brighten a sign informing us that for cottage rentals we should inquire within.

  The third and final element of this enterprise, ten cottages, lies past the restaurant. The units are arranged in an arc, sheltered under m
ature New Zealand Christmas trees and graceful acacias softly but magically lighted. It appears to be a motor court from the early days of automobile travel, a place where Humphrey Bogart might hide out with Lauren Bacall and eventually end up in a gunfight with Edward G. Robinson.

  “They’ll have two cottages available,” Annamaria predicts as she switches off the engine. When I start to open my door, she says, “No. Wait here. We’re not far from Magic Beach. There may be an all-points bulletin out for you.”

  After thwarting delivery of the four thermonuclear devices to terrorists, mere hours earlier, I’d called the FBI office in Santa Cruz to report that they could find four bomb triggers among the used clothing in a Salvation Army collection bin in Magic Beach. They know I’m not one of the conspirators, but they are eager to talk with me anyway. As far as the FBI is concerned, this is prom night, and they don’t want me leaving the dance with anyone but them.

  “They don’t know my name,” I assure Annamaria. “And they don’t have my picture.”

  “They might have a good description. Before you show yourself around here, Oddie, let’s see how big a story it is on the news.”

  I extract my wallet from a hip pocket. “I’ve got some cash.”

  “So do I.” She waves away the wallet. “Enough for this.”

  As I slump in the dark car, she goes into the diner.

  She is wearing athletic shoes, gray slacks, and a baggy sweater that doesn’t conceal her pregnancy. The sleeves are too long, hanging past the first knuckles of her fingers. She looks like a waif.

  People warm to her on sight, and the trust that she inspires in everyone is uncanny. They aren’t likely to turn her away just because she lacks a credit card and ID.

  In Magic Beach, she had been living rent-free in an apartment above a garage. She says that although she never asks for anything, people give her what she needs. I have seen that this is true.

  She claims there are people who want to kill her, but she seems to have no fear of them, whoever they might be. I have yet to see proof that she fears anything.